All Netted Together: Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and the Social Life of a Theory

This exhibition draws upon Libraries and Cultural Resources recently acquired D. Hall Darwin-Wallace Collection, which brings together over one hundred works by and about Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the British naturalists who independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection in the late 1850s.

Highlights include first editions, original Darwin letters, and a rare 1868 photograph of Darwin by Julia Margaret Cameron.

The emergence of natural selection, the mechanism by which biological evolution occurs, was among the most momentous and destabilizing scientific events of the nineteenth century. Readers who opened Darwin’s On the Origin of Species found themselves confronting a new account of their own origins, one that displaced humanity from the centre of creation and bound every living thing into a single, branching family tree.

All Netted Together traces that upheaval through the works that made it possible and the works it provoked: the earlier scientific writing that shaped Darwin and Wallace’s thinking, and the critiques, celebrations, and rebuttals that followed. Together, they invite visitors to revisit a theory that changed biology, and our understanding of life on earth, permanently.

Curated by Annie Murray and Lulu Petsrosyan.